Screen:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
Screen MISBEGOTTEN NOON THE WORST YET FILMNOIR is becoming the bete noire of the movie industry. Actually, this kind of film, the atmospheric thrillers that began being made here in the 1940s,...
...While he is brooding on the tragedy and craving revenge against the unknown assailant, a woman comes into his life - a rich and beautiful woman who is just slumming at first, but then falls in love with him and tries desperately to pull him out of his funk...
...Diva wasn't exactly a film noir itself...
...At least Kinski feels at home in a movie like this, though...
...It was a pastiche of punk culture, policier fiction, and nonsense...
...It was only the moviemakers who loved these films, not moviegoers...
...Scratch the surface of any film noir, and you'll find a romance underneath - an uneasy, suspicious, painful, on-again-off-again romance, but romance nonetheless...
...Where the other movie was quick-witted, the new one is torpid, vapid...
...The eclectic imagination, the nimble mix of settings and scenes that worked so well before, now moves in slow motion...
...If Beineix is unable to give heart to his characters, he is also unable to imagine the kind of heartless world in which they are supposed to be living...
...with Gerard Depardieu as the stevedore, Gerard, and Nastassia Kinski as the woman, Loretta, this film had a certain promise to which it never lives up...
...That's why it takes him so long to tell his story...
...It constantly surprised...
...In fact I strongly suspect that at least for now, as I said at the outset, this whole genre is washed up...
...Depardieu is clearly lost and confused...
...Actually, this kind of film, the atmospheric thrillers that began being made here in the 1940s, has always been avoided by audiences...
...Young directors love to make them as much today as they did thirty-five years ago, and occasionally a new one comes along, like Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat, that is great...
...This time Beineix has tried to make a film that's all relationship, one that's only about what passes between the characters emotionally...
...Moon in the Gutter has been adapted by Beineix and collaborator Oliver Mercault from yet another Goodis book...
...It's as if Beineix's two stars were in different movies...
...The problem is that a movie paced this slowly can't work if, it's trying to be pregnant with meaning...
...The reason Moon in the Gutter doesn't work is that there's never enough plot to generate the tension such romance needs to be credible...
...She chooses her vehicles the way a moony teenager might choose to identify with the heroine of a trashy novel...
...Kinski has a penchant for bogus scripts with meretricious heroines in them, as she has shown lately by starring in Paul Schrader's The Cat People, James Toback's Exposed (opposite Rudolf Nureyev) and now Moon in the Gutter...
...The acting should be blank, the image "ironed flat," as Robert Bresson once put it...
...COLIN L. westerbeck, JR...
...Its appeal lay in its being something new that didn't quite fit any of the old genre categories...
...A perfect example would be David Goodis, who wrote the novels on which were based the forties' Bogart thriller, Dark Passage and, later, Francois Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player...
...Depardieu, lounging moodily in the dilapidated courtyard of Gerard's house, reminds me more of Brando in Streetcar Named Desire...
...It needs a rest...
...He fills almost every scene with expressive glances and significant exchanges...
...But in Moon in the Gutter, success has gone to Beineix's head...
...Far from achieving the kind of intense relationship he hopes for, Beineix creates two characters who don't seem to connect at all...
...Beineix's previous film, the hit Diva, might also have led us to expect something better this time...
...The two failures are mutual...
...It's the story of a stevedore whose sister has been raped and murdered...
...His performance is so off-beat, it nearly falls right off the screen at times...
...were not box-office smashes in their day...
...The ones that are thought of as great classics now - Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, etal...
...He shrugs his way through his role...
...The words that come to mind most readily to characterize its energies - panache maybe, or even pizzazz - are the ones you would use to praise a striking layout in a fashion magazine...
...Otherwise, the action becomes cloying, pretentious, hopelessly melodramatic...
...So are those between the director on the one side, and his case on the other...
...A man torn thus between sex and violence is classic material...
...Despite delayed reactions, however, it can at least be said of the early examples of the genre that they were good movies...
...It had a kind of verve and flair all its own...
...Think of Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep, or William Hurt and Kathleen Turner in Body Heat...
...Jean-Jacques Beineix's The Moon in the Gutter is the worst yet...
...Most recent efforts to revive or pay homage to it, such as Wim Wenders's listless Hammett, have been awful...
...On the contrary, it should be sterile...
...Diva was all dazzling poses, with very little attention to human psychology...
...She has no taste...
...What was amusingly light-headed in the earlier film is ponderous in this one...
...Kinski appears to be modeling her performance on Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (she looks rather like the young Bergman, particularly around the mouth...
...Film noir was of course a French invention, and the hardboiled writers who fed the genre, including a number of Americans, were as celebrated in France as they were here...
...But I think that by and large this genre has run its course...
Vol. 110 • October 1983 • No. 17
